No. Always been pretty shallow with a million holes in most plots. People pretend its worse for whatever reason… maybe streamers give a lot of these people something to parrot in hopes of sounding original.
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No, it isn’t. And the expression you’re thinking of has the monkey eventually typing Shakespeare. F
I liked how old wow was set up as a series of small adventures with one overarching theme for a zone, but it was largely skippable. Much more sandbox than what we have today. To be fair we had a LOT of stupid quests too. But each one had a backstory that kind of made sense. And reading them did a lot of world building. The plots had plenty of holes in them, but they weren’t meant to be taken seriously.
You’d get to a new area, explore around until you discovered a city of some sort, you’d talk to NPCs and eventually find the quests (which didn’t appear on your map) by exploring buildings and going everywhere. Then you would read the quest text to figure out what to do (because it wasn’t on your map) and if you couldn’t find it you would do something unthinkable by today’s standards… Ask another player in general chat where to go.
SL storychain is probably a few hundred mandatory quests in a row and it felt like a good half of them are just “talk to X”, “listen to NPC #14325 and NPC #83912 talk to each other” or “Go to Y” with travel time as the main component. There’s no exploration because you just follow the yellow diamond as fast as you can while avoiding mobs. There’s no discovering things because your told exactly where the quest hubs are. There’s no interaction because you just use WoWhead open in another window when you can’t find something.
SL, and everything back to WoD was meant to be SUPER SERIOUS with some comedy thrown in every once in a while, while pre-WoD I think the game was a lot more casual and lighthearted. It was an RPG and now it’s a lobby game with a few remaining action-rpg elements and story cutscenes.
Also… SL story gave me 2 days of story content while leveling. If there was no timegating it would be 3 days of content. Go try clearing all the story related quests in TBC, WOTLK or Vanilla in 2-3 days.
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Other than the suramar campaign I think pretty much all of WoWs story arcs are pretty…juvenile
After WOTLK because they had used up all the lore based on the RTS games and then had to start cranking out new lore to make the following expansions make sense.
But Blizzards are more likely to happen in Northern regions than Southern
There was never single time in the history of World of Warcraft was the writing was stellar, not a single time. The only time any writing related to WoW was decently good was in Warcraft and the books. But in WoW, nah, you’re wrong… not one expansion had amazing writing.
Everything started falling apart with Cataclysm.
They started recycling raid bosses and content, neutered the talent tree, and the story started going off the rails.
cata, they fixed their compass to point north during MoP but then it took an express train to the south pole during WoD and set up base camp there ever since
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Yeah, I’d mostly agree with this.
I actually thought at the time that WotLK was a prime example of really bad writing for the main part of the expansion, but showed off some good writing for secondary aspects. Like, the best handling of story in WotLK… was the plot for Ulduar and Yogg Saron.
But the Lich King? What a terrible handling of the main plot. Really embarrassingly bad. People who think of WotLK’s main plot as well handled are really just transferring positive feelings for the writing done in WC 3 to WotLK.
The Argent Tournament is one example of how bad it was. Another example is just the squandering of plot resources. It’s easy for people to forget that when WC 3’s expansion ended, Arthas merged with Ner’zhul, he didn’t kill him. The last line of Frozen Throne was “Now, we are one.” The Ner’zhul side of the Lich King offered rich opportunities to craft a story with the two personalities sharing the same body, and for the Lich King story itself to tie in equally with the Horde as it did to the Alliance. Ner’zhul had connections to Thrall’s parents - who he told not to drink the demon blood. He led the Horde on Draenor for a time. That stuff should have been a big deal.
And instead what did Blizzard do? They killed the Ner’zhul side of the Lich King off in a freaking book. People just playing the games weren’t even given an explanation for why the Lich King wasn’t a merging of Arthas and Ner’zhul, but instead just treated as Arthas. (Admittedly, there was one tiny quest in WotLK where you can tell someone at Blizzard wrote dialogue under the impression Ner’zhul was still part of him, where the Lich King says in a shadow realm that he was a shaman once). Overall, the handling of the “Lich King” was one squandered opportunity after another.
I’d add in too that the story of the expansion as a whole was, “The Lich King and Scourge get their butt kicked across all of Northrend. Instead of the final confrontation being a desperate attempt to stop the Lich King before his armies win, it comes across like a coup de grace on a mostly defeated enemy. The Alliance and Horde, fresh off of holding a renaissance faire in his base zone, are so totally dominant over the Lich King they also have time to engage in an airship battle with each other while ascending his tower, cause he’s just that little of a threat. Then in the final, final battle, it’s revealed actually the Lich King could have won at any time and he was just letting us win, but also, a deus ex machina miracle will then beat him for us.”
I can’t imagine writing a story that bad. TBC was also terrible too for most of its main plot. Ironically, I’d say for the MMO era, the best “main plot” handling they actually had was probably MoP. It felt like a serious step up in the writing department.
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Metzen had a knack for bringing a world alive through his writing etc…
Danuser and this team, not so much it seems.
I haven’t played pre legion but playing through the old content… the story-bits were always pretty neat.
That’s the fault of the person who leads their questing team.
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My only complaint about story is how often it feels like they either forget, or outright retcon stuff. Feels like we cannot go two expansions anymore without needing to change the old story to meet the new.
The moment someone wrote down the word Warcraft, the writing has been downhill ever since
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Team is a team, these poop quests are integral to getting further into the story
Yes very integral 
Well not really. A lot of things are just filler. MMO’s require a lot of that. WoW just gets really lazy with it most of the times.
Blizz’s writing went south when they went “woke”.
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I love and die by the poop
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Don’t let anyone fool you… The story went south after Legion. WoD should have never existed… Garrosh should have died with Mists and Legion should have came after. Timelines and poor development have negatively affected the story and this dev teams ability to tell the story.
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WoD.
They kind of started struggling there. Legion wasn’t really bad but definitely has some “um what?” moments. lol
BfA, well the base story was ok, but all the dot’s didn’t connect well. Most did pretty good, but some were well, silly. Not in the humorous way, but in the “What? You want me to do what? Why?” way.
And SL is just sort of lost. We are doing things for others that are more powerful than us, but apparently they can’t do it… Um…
SL is struggling but the leaders are too obstinate. Yet, they are supposed to be these wise, supreme beings with lots of power and abilities who got together and created an afterlife… But they can’t see anything beyond their noses. Sort of doesn’t match up.
Blizzard has never been good at writing when its been story-first – it has always been good for setting up background and situations, but never as the focal point.
This is always why Blizzard has the issues with continuity.